Germaine Dulac

She was born Charlotte Elisabeth Germaine Saisset-Schneider in Amiens and married Louis-Albert Dulac in 1905. From 1909 she wrote for the feminist magazine La Française and became its drama critic. During the First World War she set up a production company with the writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, backed by her husband's money, and made her first film, Les Sœurs ennemies.

She made La Fête espagnole (1920) with Louis Delluc, and in The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) she put an unhappy wife's fantasies on screen with slow motion, distortion and superimposition. The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) came from a scenario by Antonin Artaud, who objected to how she filmed it. At its premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on 9 February 1928, Surrealists broke up the screening and shouted that she was a cow.

In the late 1920s she made short, wordless 'pure cinema' films built like music, among them Disque 957 and Theme and Variations (both 1928). She led the Fédération des ciné-clubs, which screened work by younger filmmakers such as Jean Vigo and Joris Ivens. From 1930 she made newsreels for Pathé and then Gaumont, and she died in Paris in 1942.